Commentary

Here’s the latest article from Andrew Revkin at the New York Times: Carbon-Neutral is Hip, but is it Green.  In the Middle Ages, Indulgences enabled the wealthy to give the church a sum of money and in return be forgiven of their sin.  The practice was criticized for a tendency to enable the sinning to continue.  Why stop sinning when you can buy an indulgence to be forgiven? 

The indulgence connection to carbon offsets is that they can be used to eliminate the guilt of owning a gas-guzzler so that you can continue to drive it. 

I’m not sure why but the comparison of carbon offsets to indulgences has never struck me quite right.  If we want people to reduce their CO2 emissions and if an SUV driver decides to pay someone else to reduce their CO2 emissions on their behalf, why not?

Americans love to pay someone else to do things we need done but don’t want to do ourselves (assuming we can afford it): growing our food, cleaning our teeth, repairing our cars.  We even outsource charity.  A $100 donation to a charity is, in effect, paying the charity $15 to do $85 worth of charitable good works on your behalf. 

Is this bad?  It’s just our modern lives where it’s more efficient for us to specialize in something: schooling, parenting, stock brokering, farming, hair styling, writing, and then we trade with each other.  I’ll teach your kids if you repair my car.

With CO2 emissions reductions we judge the means, not the ends.  We tend to say, don’t offset your CO2 emissions, change your lifestyle.  It’s what kind of car do you drive, how much flying in an airplane do you do, period. 

What’s happening here?  It’s ambivalence about the quality of carbon offsets.  They come in many shapes and sizes and work in different ways.  BusinessWeek raises real questions about how some of them work.  But if the carbon offset is a clear, well-documented, immediate and additional reduction of CO2, I think it’s healthy. 

I will go further and say that we need high-quality effective offsets now because on average we are more likely to get people to reduce their CO2 emission through an offset purchase than we are to get them to buy a car that they feel cramped in.

When we get the true costs of energy inefficient houses and cars factored into the cost models, we don’t have to label SUV driving, for example, as bad.  We can let economics drive peoples choices.  Then, if you want to drive a Ferrari and have the money to offset its emissions, great.